Would you like your Internet to be hobbled? If so, how would you like your internet to be hobbled? Would you like your downloads to be slightly faster than an anebriated snail while your google searches come up faster than snot from a sneezing sloth? In case you haven't heard, I am talking about the recent loss the FCC suffered in it's battle for Internet neutrality.

While the FCC is appealing the decision I don't think that we will see the results of that appeal anytime soon. You all know how fast the justice system works. In the meantime I wouldn't be surprised at all if the ISPs get out their pocket calculators and figure out the next level of price ranges to enable them to gouge us some more for internet access.

First there were connection time limits, for those of you who remember the good'ol bulletin boards where you could download a whole half a megabyte in fifty minutes. Then, as technology advanced and we all connected with faster and faster connections they added on speed and quota limits. So, when looking at which internet package we could buy, we had to choose a balance between how much we could download and how fast we could download it. Even the unlimited accounts have (at least where I live) a fair usage quota which, if you passed that point, your speed was limited to being slightly faster than an anebriated snail.

Now it appears that you will now have to choose how you want your speed to be carved up. In order to illustrate this concept think of a multi-lane highway. Each lane has different speed limits which together add up to the total speed limit of the highway. The enterance of each lane has it's own toll booth with a different price depending on the speed of each lane. You then have to decide what type of vehicle (data) goes down which lane and pay accordingly.

That is the best scenario. The worst case is the ISP decides which type of data gets the best speed and if you don't like it then you can fold it up into sharp corners and shove it where the sun doesn't shine. That is unless you are able to pay big bucks and then you can do the shoving and the ISP will gladly take it. For that to happen your name would have to be Google, Facebook, Twitter or something similar.

Either way, the end result is probably the same, you, the consumer of internet bits, nibbles and bytes, is going to get screwed and you won't even be able to have a relaxing smoke afterwards (provided you enjoy that sort of thing).

In case you haven't noticed I am not in favour of the ISP determining how to carve up the bandwith I am paying for. If, for example, I pay for 25Mb per second I want that 25Mb per second. I do not want that speed reduced simply because I am downloading a certain type of file.

The way I think of it is if the ISP cannot supply the advertised speed then that ISP has overbooked itself and cannot meet the needs of all the customers it has. That to me shows greed and inconsideration for the people who are paying money for a service.

On top of all that, to lobby for justification to further limit those paying customers indicates the ultimate in greed. It seems as though the ISP is just working on getting more paying customers for the same slice of pie.

What do you think of the ISPs hobbling your internet traffic? Do you agree with it or are you against it? Is Internet neutrality the better way? Tell us in the comments below. Don't worry, I won't limit your comment character limit :)

Some name

I've always been fascinated with graphics and wrote my first drawing program on the venerable apple ][e. After discovering the x86 IBM clones and wrangling my way into the computer industry I'm now immersed in work as a Computer Engineer, System Administrator, OS builder (Linux from Scratch and Android) and general techno-head.

"I always feel that some internet service providers are not being fair towards the customers. Just like you said, I should get what I paid for whatever we are doing with the internet connection. Just because it is something ISP don’t like, we don’t have to satisfy with the slower speed. There are cap limits for several ISP’s internet plans. It can be justified as those plans are aimed at people with differing usage of the internet. But for a particular internet plan, different speeds for different files or different types of usage , that cannot be justified. That said, I know of
various internet service providers providing good internet service to customers with affordable plans and good speed. !***! Entry Link:
How do you like your Internet hobbled? !***!"

"I have always held that the only proper operational model for a communications business is not to promise more than you can deliver, the corollary being that you don't take on more customers than you can handle at perpetual saturation level. If you can handle 42 customers at maximum usage, you simply don't take on customer 43.

I'm sure that I'll take flak for this as usual, but I'm tired of hobbled internet services, and make no mistake, almost no service provider actually provides a proper internet connection. What is the point of a 24x7 connection if I can't run servers on it? What's with this asymmetric speed rubbish? If data volume is a factor, you're doing it so wrong the meme needs to be raised exponentially to express the sheer volume of the wrongosity.

I hold all communications companies to the same standard. I consider it flat-out criminal that the communications infrastructure is in such execrable shape that the phone companies have to plan for Mothers Day, an event that shouldn't even be a ripple on a properly set up system, yet it often causes out national phone network to fall over.

If you use the word Internet in your service offering, then I am paying you to haul bits from me to the edge of your network, and from the edge of your network to me. You may may or may not ever have both ends of the chain on your network. You don't get to set packet priorities. I will filter from my end, once it hits your network, you do your best to get it to the edge. Don't like it, get out of the business, I will rag on you for failures, if you consider the language of my complaints to be too much, count your blessings, I'm usually far more polite than any given situation calls for. If I'm swearing at you, you deserve far worse. Notwithstanding the classification blunder that says otherwise, you are a common carrier. You move my communications and are not entitled to any more value that may result from the transmission than you are being paid to move it. Make your deals with the other carriers to get data around, but don't expect to charge those sending data to me anything unless they are on the same network with me, and then they are already paying you for service and you don't get to charge them anything more.

If I'm saving money by using what carriers call 'over-the-top' services, you are being paid to move the bits, you don't get a cut of the savings. The ability to use these OTT services is part of what I am paying for, block or hobble them and your value drops. If I'm using a video or audio streaming service, both ends are getting paid. Re-work the deals with other carriers if you have to, but you only get to charge your direct customers. The customer of the other network has to be baked into the interconnect deal as far as you are concerned.

As detailed above, anyone with experience with telcos, middlemen, and end-user providers understands that these are often little better than extortioners and robbers. Such roles are default for a monopoly provider of any necessary or desired good/service. Any monopoly which
doesn'tbehave badly is the occasion for amazed surprise, and should be annually and regularly heralded.

However, individual end-users can also be greedy fools. Putting those who use the Internet for life-sustaining and necessary functions via HTML texts on the self-same footing as those who are looking to watch snuff and stomping-kittens porn via HiDef video is wrong.

Of course, most Web users fall in between those two extremes, but the point is valid. The fact that someone has paid for a 25mb/sec connection doesn't excuse him/her clogging the pipes for everyone else by viewing HiDef videos whenever. Not without paying sufficiently, so that all intermediate entities may afford to provision and reprovision (and reprovision) to support such capability, so as prevent negatively impacting other users.

Each time infrastructure and facilities get upgraded to support new usage types, even newer ways of gobbling up that bandwidth get invented and deployed. Usually ones which would make humanity's ancestors want to slaughter a large fraction of today's infestation. I reckon the next 'innovation' will be online 3D video presentation devices? Projectors connected to Web sites so as to generate interactive and 3D life-size 'dolls' in some 'holodeck' manner?

Better to argue for 'net neutrality between usage types. If for a particular usage class, packets may arrive asynchronously, to be reassembled in a program before presentation, with no critical time dependency, these may be priced at a same lower level. If packets must arrive only in critical time windows, as with high-definition video, these should be priced at a uniform higher level.

The demand that a user places on shared facilities should be reflected in the provisioning cost, because it's certainly reflected in shared infrastructure and facility costs. Those who covet a Google site's bandwidth should look at that site's connection bills, and think about themselves paying even 1% thereof.

It is true that North America's digital-media home users are viciously defrauded. If media reports are to be credited, Japanese urban Internet users routinely enjoy 64mb/sec throughput for circa $12/month. North Americans living in similar urban densities should be paying comparable rates; among G-8 countries, for provisioning and use for Internet connections and services, the pricing should be in comparable ranges for comparable conditions.

If governments truly believe that the Internet is now critical to their national economies and to civic activities, as the US government seems to think with its policy of putting nigh everything on-line (including national secrets), then equal treatment for equivalent behaviors becomes important. Those fibers and signals after all cross public property... !***! Entry Link:
How do you like your Internet hobbled? !***!"

As detailed above, anyone who with experience with telcos, middlemen, and end-user providers understands that these are often little better than extortioners and robbers. Such roles are default for a monopoly provider of any necessary or desired good/service. Any monopoly which
doesn'tbehave badly is the occasion for amazed surprise, and should be annually and regularly heralded.

However, individual end-users can also be greedy fools. Putting those who use the Internet for life-sustaining and necessary functions via HTML texts on the self-same footing as those who are looking to watch snuff and stomping-kittens porn via HiDef video is wrong.

Of course, most Web users fall in between those two extremes, but the point is valid. The fact that someone has paid for a 25mb/sec connection doesn't excuse him/her clogging the pipes for everyone else by viewing HiDef videos whenever. Not without paying sufficiently, so that all intermediate entities may afford to provision and reprovision (and reprovision) to support such capability, so as prevent negatively impacting other users.

Each time infrastructure and facilities get upgraded to support new usage types, even newer ways of gobbling up that bandwidth get invented and deployed. Usually ones which would make humanity's ancestors want to slaughter a large fraction of today's infestation. I reckon the next 'innovation' will be online 3D video presentation devices? Projectors connected to Web sites so as to generate interactive and 3D life-size 'dolls' in some 'holodeck' manner?

Better to argue for 'net neutrality between usage types. If for a particular usage class, packets may arrive asynchronously, to be reassembled in a program before presentation, with no critical time dependency, these may be priced at a same lower level. If packets must arrive only in critical time windows, as with high-definition video, these should be priced at a uniform higher level.

The demand that a user places on shared facilities should be reflected in the provisioning cost, because it's certainly reflected in shared infrastructure and facility costs. Those who covet a Google site's bandwidth should look at that site's connection bills, and think about themselves paying even 1% thereof.

It is true that North America's digital-media home users are viciously defrauded. If media reports are to be credited, Japanese urban Internet users routinely enjoy 64mb/sec throughput for circa $12/month. North Americans living in similar urban densities should be paying comparable rates; among G-8 countries, for provisioning and use for Internet connections and services, the pricing should be in comparable ranges for comparable conditions.

If governments truly believe that the Internet is now critical to their national economies and to civic activities, as the US government seems to think with its policy of putting nigh everything on-line (including national secrets), then equal treatment for equivalent behaviors becomes important. Those fibers and signals after all cross public property... !***! Entry Link:
How do you like your Internet hobbled? !***!"